PewDiePie’s long reign as YouTube’s most-subscribed star may soon be coming to a close, but the outspoken vlogger isn’t finished breaking records just yet.
On Friday, the 29-year-old — whose real name is Felix Kjellberg — became the first YouTube creator to surpass 69 million subscribers. At the time of posting, he has a cool 69.3 million.
It remains to be seen whether Kjellberg will be the first YouTube channel to cross the 70 million subscriber-threshold, however. T-Series, the Indian film and music production company that has been nipping at Kjellberg’s heels and outpacing him in terms of subscriber growth, was predicted by certain digital analytics firms (including Social Blade and Tubular Labs) to surpass Kjellberg in terms of subscribers late last month. That said, T-Series has not yet crossed 69 million subscribers, standing steady at 68.7 million subscribers as of press time.
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While Kjellberg’s defeat still looks imminent — given that T-Series is a massive production company that puts out several videos per day, targeting India’s rapidly-growing YouTube audience — Kjellberg has done an impressive job of staving off the inevitable.
And he hasn’t been going at it alone. Most notably, fellow creator Jimmy ‘Mr Beast’ Donaldson — known for his stunt videos in which he frequently throws around large sums of cash — purchased space on every billboard in his town to promote Kjellberg’s channel. Kjellberg attributes the stunt to a sudden increase in subscribers. And in video last week titled I Need Your Help (below), Kellberg again griped that the mainstream media was celebrating his demise, vowing not to go down without a fight. In the video, Kjellberg begged his fans to make him the first creator to hit 69 million subscribers — and they appear to have pulled through.
In the past week, PewDiePie has trumped T-Series in terms of subscribers gains, according to internal Tubefilter data — with a total of 943,000 as opposed to T-Series’ 834,000. That said, if you take a bigger-picture look at each channel’s growth, T-Series is still trouncing Kjellberg, with roughly 4 million subscribers gained over the past month — as compared to Kjellberg’s 2.6 million.
We’ll keep you posted as the contest continues to take shape.
